Ben Jones, the actor who played Cooter Davenport on "The Dukes of Hazzard" and later served two terms in Congress as a Georgia Democrat, died Sunday of a heart attack at his home in Washington, Virginia, he was 84.

Jones was resting in his favorite chair, waiting for the Atlanta Braves to come on television, when he suffered a massive heart attack. His wife, Alma Viator, confirmed the circumstances to Fox News.

"I lost the love of my life today," Viator said. "Ben passed from a massive heart attack. He was home resting in his favorite chair waiting for the Braves to come on and whoop the Yankees."

Jones lived a life that defied every tidy category. He was a small-town North Carolina kid raised without running water, a self-described alcoholic who hit bottom on the floor of an Atlanta apartment, a character actor who turned a bit part into one of the most recognizable roles in television history, and a two-term congressman who won his seat by defeating an indicted incumbent in what CBS anchor Dan Rather called "by far the meanest and nastiest race in America."

From a section house with no electricity to Friday-night television

Benjamin Lewis Jones was born August 30, 1941, in Tarboro, North Carolina. His family moved shortly afterward to Portsmouth, Virginia, where they lived in a railroad company "section house", a company-provided dwelling with no running water, no toilets, and no electricity. His father, Hubert C. Jones, known as "Big Buck," was a railroad section foreman whom Ben later described as both "a prodigious and revered worker known as the 'last of the John Henrys'" and "a mean drunk." Ben had three brothers nicknamed Buck, Bubba, and Butch. His own nickname was Buster.

Jones discovered acting at the University of North Carolina and went on to appear in more than 100 stage productions over his career, sharing stages with James Earl Jones, Anthony Hopkins, Eva Marie Saint, and John Travolta. But alcohol shadowed every step forward.

He started drinking at 15. In his 2008 memoir, "Redneck Boy in the Promised Land," he wrote bluntly about the grip it held on him:

"Alcoholism was a constant distraction. It called to me relentlessly. I wanted it from the moment I woke up."

He described the first relief alcohol brought him as a teenager, drinking eight-ounce cans of Country Club Malt Liquor and feeling "the pain and shame I had been carrying seemed to be lifted." He also wrote, "I was the dynamite and booze was the match." The battle lasted roughly 20 years.

In 1977, after a five-week episode of heavy drinking, Jones woke on the floor of his Atlanta apartment with acute alcohol poisoning and delirium tremens. He prayed: "Please, God, help me." He entered rehabilitation and never drank again. Health crises have altered the trajectories of many public figures in Washington, but few pivoted as sharply as Jones did in the year that followed.

About a year after getting sober, he won the role that changed his life: Cooter Davenport, the grease-stained mechanic on "The Dukes of Hazzard."

Critics wrote off "The Dukes of Hazzard", tens of millions of viewers disagreed

The show debuted in January 1979 as a midseason replacement on CBS. Its own network chief, William S. Paley, disparaged it. Los Angeles Times television critic Howard Rosenberg predicted, "This show will not last past the first commercial break."

It ran for six seasons, through 1985, and ranked consistently among the top five shows on CBS. Tens of millions of viewers tuned in every Friday evening. The show arrived in a cultural moment shaped by "Smokey and the Bandit" and a Georgia peanut farmer in the White House, a moment when rural America held the screen in a way network executives had not anticipated and did not fully understand.

Cooter was initially a minor character known as "Crazy" Cooter. Jones insisted on developing the role into something more grounded. In a 2008 interview with Georgia Public Broadcasting, he explained the character's appeal in plain terms:

"He had the only garage and the only tow truck in a place where all they did was wreck cars, so every time you saw him, he was working, and people can relate to that."

Jones understood something about the show that the critics missed, and that he articulated years later in his memoir. The show's staying power, he wrote, was "simply the heartland of America sending a message about the kind of programming they would like for their family to be watching."

He put a finer point on the show's moral code:

"In our show the good guys always won, and nobody really ever got hurt. There was comic action and mock violence, but in the end, nobody bled and nobody suffered real pain. Crime and greed never paid off, and virtue was its own reward."

That sensibility, good guys win, cheaters lose, virtue matters, was not fashionable in Hollywood then, and it is less fashionable now. But it connected with an audience that felt spoken to rather than spoken about.

A TV mechanic beats an indicted incumbent for a seat in Congress

After the show ended in 1985, Democratic operatives in Georgia persuaded Jones to run for Congress in the state's Fourth District, near Atlanta. He lost to Republican incumbent Pat Swindall in 1986, but the margin was closer than expected.

Two years later, Swindall was indicted on multiple charges of lying to a grand jury. Jones ran again. Rather called the 1988 rematch "by far the meanest and nastiest race in America." Jones won.

He served two terms in the U.S. House, from 1989 to 1993, as a Democrat. AP News confirmed he had represented the district near Atlanta and noted the Rappahannock County Sheriff, Connie Compton, also confirmed his death.

After redistricting, Jones tried to unseat Newt Gingrich in a neighboring district in 1994 and lost. Congressional campaigns have a way of ending abruptly for all sorts of reasons, but Jones took his loss to Gingrich with characteristic humor. About eight years later, having moved to Virginia, he ran against Republican Eric Cantor in Virginia's Seventh Congressional District. He lost decisively. He told people at the time: "When Jonah got out of the belly of the whale, he didn't go back for his hat!"

Cooter's garage became a pilgrimage site for heartland fans

Out of office, Jones turned the show's enduring popularity into a second act. He and Viator opened Dukes of Hazzard-themed combination museums, cafes, and marketplaces in Virginia and Tennessee. He formed Cooter's Garage Band. He produced DukesFest at the Music City Motorplex in Nashville, which drew as many as 100,000 fans.

In 2006, New York Times writer Dave Itzkoff described Jones as a "high priest" to his most dedicated fans at DukesFest. The show had been off the air for two decades, but its audience had not moved on. Cooter's catchphrase, "I might be crazy, but I ain't dumb!", still got a reaction. The New York Times reported extensively on Jones's life and career, including his years of alcoholism, his congressional tenure, and his post-political reinvention as a keeper of the Dukes franchise's legacy.

Jones also wrote opinion pieces for The Washington Post and appeared on cable television talk shows. In a Georgia Public Broadcasting interview, he reflected on the faith that had sustained him after sobriety:

"The only secret of life that I have discovered for me is if you turn your life over, get out of yourself and just turn it completely over to a higher power, to the extent I've been able to do that, good things have happened."

He acknowledged his family history plainly: "There was a lot of alcoholism on both sides of my family and I inherited that genetic disposition."

Jones defended the Confederate flag on the General Lee and never backed down

The 1969 Dodge Charger known as the General Lee, with the Confederate flag painted on its roof, became one of the most recognizable cars in television history. It also became a flashpoint.

In 2012, after reports surfaced that Warner Bros. planned to remove the Confederate flag from General Lee toys and replicas, Jones publicly defended the symbol. Warner Bros. denied the reports. Jones kept pressing the point. The intersection of politics and cultural symbols has long stirred debate among public figures, and Jones waded into it without hesitation.

In 2015, after a white gunman killed nine Black parishioners at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, the gunman had been photographed brandishing the Confederate flag, Jones wrote a guest essay for The New York Times. He described the flag as a "symbol of a non-racist Southern spirit."

That position put him at odds with much of the national conversation. But Jones did not retreat from it, and he did not apologize for the show that had defined his public life.

'He will be sorely missed'

Tom Wopat, who played Luke Duke on the show, paid tribute to Jones on Instagram. Breitbart reported Wopat's full statement:

"The Dukes of Hazzard lost another integral part of their cast today. Ben Jones was a fine friend and a fierce advocate of all the best things we can offer in the entertainment business. He will be sorely missed."

Jones is survived by his wife, Alma Viator; daughters Rachel and Jeanne; son Walker; three stepchildren; and 10 grandchildren. Tragedy touching the lives of those connected to Congress is never routine, and Jones's death closes a chapter that linked small-town Southern culture, network television, and the U.S. House of Representatives in a combination no one is likely to see again.

Ben Jones got sober, got famous, got elected, and never stopped being Cooter. In an era that rewards reinvention and punishes loyalty to unfashionable things, that counts for something.